Simple solution. Just make a bait sandwich or other food with a generous helping of Denatonium mixed in. It's safe and it'll let the thief know that they may encounter other surprises during their refrigerator raids.

Or, you could just add a chopped ghost chili in the bait food and sit back and watch the fireworks.

I posted this in a TFD thread just yesterday. I will repost it for the liters:

I had an old work buddy who CLAIMS that someone at his work years ago kept stealing his lunches, like 1-2 times a week. So being the enterprising fellow that he was, he laced a sandwich with like 3-shiats of LSD and just waited. Apparently around mid-late afternoon the sandwich thief starts losing his shiat because, well...hes tripping balls.

He got rushed to the hospital because he started freaking out. He was back a few days later and my buddies lunch never got stolen again. I guess HR and some of the upper ups came in and accused the office of lacing his coffee with LSD, yeah, his coffee, not the lunch he was stealing. There was a mandatory drug test for all employees right there on the spot. My friend passed, as he did not do drugs all that often.

Again, my friend may be blowing smoke up my ass with this story, but it is amusing either way.

PacManDreaming:Simple solution. Just make a bait sandwich or other food with a generous helping of Denatonium mixed in. It's safe and it'll let the thief know that they may encounter other surprises during their refrigerator raids.

Or, you could just add a chopped ghost chili in the bait food and sit back and watch the fireworks.

Canned cat food has a similar effect. The liver version is especially pungent.

I hate to be Debbie Downer, but just in case anybody thinks lacing anything actually is a good idea, not only are you likely to be fired for lacing your food if you get caught, you'll also likely face charges.

my old program director at the radio station would leave a few TV dinners in the freezer in case he worked late but the weirdos who did overnights or weekends would steal them. Lacing several with syrup of ipecac made that stop real fast. Also too, the guy got fired because he left the board unattended which resulted in lots of dead air.

Does this actually happen? I've worked in half a dozen offices over the past 15 years and have never had my lunch stolen, or heard of anyone else who did.

The worst thing I ever saw was a co-worker take someone's lunch out of the microwave while it was cooking to put his own food in. He was caught immediately and ostracized and then shunned by everyone in the office until he quit a few weeks later (he was a dick anyway).

Vegan Meat Popsicle:I hate to be Debbie Downer, but just in case anybody thinks lacing anything actually is a good idea, not only are you likely to be fired for lacing your food if you get caught, you'll also likely face charges.

This is an ongoing problem at my workplace, especially after we hire a group of new employees. I think part of the problem is that not only are most of the new hires young people, but for many of them it's their first job. I think they see the fridge situation as being similar to their parents' or a friend's fridge, where no one minds if you eat or drink something. They have so sense of workplace behavior. Mind you, though, I'm not excusing their behavior in any manner because it boils down to being theft no matter how you look at it.

And a couple of days ago the theft expanded from being irritating to downright weird. One of my co-worker/friends has been bringing in a few ice packs to treat an injured ankle. She swaps them out a couple times a day as the ice pack starts to soften. When she went to swap out an ice pack she saw that someone had stolen them from the freezer section of the breakroom fridge.

Why in the hell would you steal ice packs? That makes no f*cking sense whatsoever.

Vegan Meat Popsicle:I hate to be Debbie Downer, but just in case anybody thinks lacing anything actually is a good idea, not only are you likely to be fired for lacing your food if you get caught, you'll also likely face charges.

/ so be extra, EXTRA sneaky

Prove it. I happen to LIKE my sandwiches with hidden habanero peppers in it, and i LIKE my ice cream with flakes of chocolate Exlax. It keeps me regular.

I'm so glad American workers no longer face the dangers of going out to lunch and eating meals prepared in an inspected commercial kitchen. Thank god they can now store their cold lunch in a community refrigerator that probably hasn't been cleaned in years and isn't inspected. Plus they get the added bonus of having spittle, urine, penis leavings and any number of other deposits left in their food by disgruntled coworkers.

Thank god we've let employers give us this alternative to the nasty old way of a half hour or hour lunch break.

Humerous notes? How about, "if you are caught stealing you wll be fired on the spot. The state wll be advised not to offer unemployment compensation as the action of termination was the result of illegal ativity"

Langdon Alger:my old program director at the radio station would leave a few TV dinners in the freezer in case he worked late but the weirdos who did overnights or weekends would steal them. Lacing several with syrup of ipecac made that stop real fast. Also too, the guy got fired because he left the board unattended which resulted in lots of dead air.

That happend at the station I worked at too. There is something not right about overnight and weekend guys.

Vegan Meat Popsicle:I hate to be Debbie Downer, but just in case anybody thinks lacing anything actually is a good idea, not only are you likely to be fired for lacing your food if you get caught, you'll also likely face charges.

/ so be extra, EXTRA sneaky

I like 3 sliced Ghost Chilis on my roast beef, just like every other normal human being.

They brought in a bunch of temp employees one summer. lunches started disappeering. One permanent guy always kept a large bottle of juice in the fridge. He got suspicious that it was being stolen too so he marked the bottle and sure enough it was. So he peed in it. He told all of us permanent employees about it since he assumed it was one of the temps. He didn't tell the temps. Sure enough it was still being stolen. Went on like that until the juice started changing from red color to pee color. He finally threw it out. Never told them they were drinking piss.

We had great fun coming in each day at lunch to check the previous days mark on the bottle.

Vegan Meat Popsicle:I hate to be Debbie Downer, but just in case anybody thinks lacing anything actually is a good idea, not only are you likely to be fired for lacing your food if you get caught, you'll also likely face charges.

/ so be extra, EXTRA sneaky

I think it would be hard to press charges against someone for lacing their own food, you could very easily just say that you have a bolima problem and putting ipicac in your sandwich saves a step. Hell at that point you have a disability and HR can't touch you.

next time there is one of those threads where people who love flaming hot anus pain brag at length about the various hot peppers they love to deep throat at the truck stop glory hole, take note of the most horrendous peppers so you know which to buy. hide them in assorted lunches and enjoy the fun.

The one thing that I will shamefully admit to doing in the past is using condiments people leave in the fridge in small amounts (such as soya sauce or mustard and only if the bottle is mostly full - wouldn't take if I would leave less than enough servings to finish the week) on days that I happened to forget some of my own.

FarkerinMN:Vegan Meat Popsicle: I hate to be Debbie Downer, but just in case anybody thinks lacing anything actually is a good idea, not only are you likely to be fired for lacing your food if you get caught, you'll also likely face charges.

/ so be extra, EXTRA sneaky

I think it would be hard to press charges against someone for lacing their own food, you could very easily just say that you have a bolima problem and putting ipicac in your sandwich saves a step. Hell at that point you have a disability and HR can't touch you.

Office savages. A coworker once ran to Target during lunch and picked up a whole bunch of frozen meals. She put them in the office freezer, still in the Target bag, to eat throughout the week. The next day or the following Monday or something, she went down in the freezer, and they were gone. Admittedly, she didn't write her name on the lunches, but they were tied up in a shopping bag for fark's sake!

My brother once found half of his salad missing. Half! Like the thief suddenly realized, "Hey, this isn't my lunch! Oops!"

The president of the company gets baked and will eat a bunch of chips out of the random communal bags we might have laying around and then not shut them back up but nobody will say anything because dude owns the company.

This happened to me just yesterday, and I was shocked at how pissed I got, though part of my annoyance came from the fact that Last week I was diagnosed as Diabetic and I'm trying to control it primarily nurtitionally with a low-carb regimine, so the food in that lunch was A) needed at precisely the time I went to go eat it and B) not easily replaced at the local drug store/ lunch eateries

Still, who the fark does this? It's nearly an automatic firing if you get caught and honestly how immature and callous do you have to be to think this is okay?

Vegan Meat Popsicle:I hate to be Debbie Downer, but just in case anybody thinks lacing anything actually is a good idea, not only are you likely to be fired for lacing your food if you get caught, you'll also likely face charges.

/ so be extra, EXTRA sneaky

They make some hot sauce now days that can be painful but they are food items. I would also label my food container has have such, let the thief who took a sandwich labeled - hot do not eat - complain that he was poisoned.

PacManDreaming:Simple solution. Just make a bait sandwich or other food with a generous helping of Denatonium mixed in. It's safe and it'll let the thief know that they may encounter other surprises during their refrigerator raids.

Or, you could just add a chopped ghost chili in the bait food and sit back and watch the fireworks.

I used habaneros(sp?) in a tuna salad sandwich. The sandwich was found with one bite taken out of it but it was never traced back to the thief.

Here's another solution: Lunch left at your desk for a few hours won't kill you, particularly if you heat the crap out of it before you eat. (If anything, the low doses of mild bacteria buildup will make you much stronger when you inevitably encounter real food poisoning.) This whole mentality of MUST PUT EVERYTHING IN FRIDGE IMMEDIATELY OR I DIE boggles my mind. If it gets stolen off of your desk, you have much bigger problems at your office.

Although if you're prone to forgetting about your dairy-based lunch and grabbing it the next day because you're a total workaholic, you should probably ignore this advice.

/Has tried that when starving and yesterday's lunch in my backpack was all that as available. Did not turn out well. At all. Blech.

Jerkwater:Does this actually happen? I've worked in half a dozen offices over the past 15 years and have never had my lunch stolen, or heard of anyone else who did.

Short answer: yes.

Long(er) answer: People have a tendency to behave differently when they don't think anyone else is watching them. More importantly, they behave differently when they know that it's difficult or impossible to inforce a code of conduct. You see it most blatantly with online trolling, etc., but in short - people behave according to their true nature when they feel that there is no ramifications to their actions. It is at this point, you get to see how people truly are... and in many cases it's disappointing because they show just how petty they are. The Roman Senator Tacitus was writing about this behavior back in 98AD. We haven't come far in 2000 or so years.